The Clinch Knot (22 page)

Dropping Like Flies

 

Change at the Park County Sheriff’s Department was in the news the next day. I grabbed a
Bozeman Chronicle
at the motel office and brought it back.

The county board of supervisors, including Rita Crowe, had put Sheriff Roy Chubbuck on indefinite medical leave and initiated an investigation of departmental priorities and procedures. Clearly nothing of Chubbuck’s play for Tucker’s land had been disclosed to county office holders.

The paper said the new Acting Interim Sheriff, Deputy Russell Crowe, was recovering well from minor injuries sustained in the recent escape of detainee D’Ontario Sneed, formerly a suspect in the murder of Jesse Ringer. Charges against Sneed had been reduced by the Park County DA from first-degree murder to resisting an officer, and Sneed would be released on signature pending investigation into a further charge of reckless vehicular endangerment. Acting Interim Sheriff Crowe, the paper said, had been the sheriff’s loyal right-hand man and was the presumed front-runner in a special election for sheriff to be held in the coming months.

“Maybe that coffee-drinking chica can sue this bunch of goofballs too,” Aretha suggested.

“Do you really think—” there was something bothering me “—that D’Ontay could have overpowered Russell Crowe? A trained and armed sheriff’s deputy? And wasn’t there also a nurse in that ambulance, an orderly, anyone? And how did he end up in Livingston so fast? On Main Street? Right where Tick Judith would find him?”

“At this point, do I really care?” Aretha asked. “That’s the better question.”

We were private enough—at a picnic table in Sacagawea Park, practicing knots—that when my mind wouldn’t settle she grabbed my hand and squeezed it. Damn. I liked that.

“Come on, Hoss. It’s over.”

She had the clinch knot down. It was easy. Gray just wasn’t a fisherman. We were moving on to the surgeon’s knot. But I couldn’t let it rest.

“Do you remember Hilarious Sorgensen saying D’Ontay and Jesse stole a fly rod? And that’s why he fired them? Why would they do that?”

Aretha rolled her eyes. “That girl did drugs, Hoss. Where I’m from, that explains about ninety percent of all bad shit that happens. Money for drugs. The other ten percent is just for fun.”

I was thinking of Cord Cook being minus a boat, looking across the park at my Cruise Master gathering dust in the kid’s driveway, when Aretha gave me a stiff but playful shove.

“What’s the point in being a trout bum,” she wondered, “if you’re going to carry the world around on your shoulders? Come on. It’s over. Let’s get busy here. I want to get the hang of this fly fishing game before D’Ontay gets out of the hospital. He thinks he’s something. I am going to blow that child away.”

We stood at the bank of the Yellowstone. “See, grass in the park just sits there, but water moves. It never stops. No time outs. That’s the challenge.”

“You’re saying I’m not ready for it?”

“You’re not ready for it.”

“So get me ready.” She waded barefoot in ankle-deep water, her jeans rolled up, hot sun striking white shirt against brown skin, sweat on her forehead and a smile for me.

“I … this is awkward … do you mind?”

“Should I mind?”

I moved stiffly behind her and matched my arms to her arms, fit my hands over hers, and we began to cast and strip, cast and strip, until we found a rhythm together.

“You got it?”

“Hmmm,” she said. “Not quite yet.”

When I left Aretha at the Geyser in the late afternoon she was threatening to freshen up for supper. It seemed okay now to drive her rental car out to Sorgensen’s Fly ‘n’ Float to catch the arrival of the guides and their clients.

There were no fisticuffs today. Instead there was the general giddiness of a good day on the river. When the fish were on, there was water for everyone. I picked Cord Cook out of a small crowd around a tailgate and a beer cooler.

“Hey,” he said, raising his can as I approached. “How you doing?”

“Hey,” slurred one of his new clients, raising his can as well, “how you doing? I do everything Cord does, see? Guy’s a helluva guide. Do what Cord does, that’s the ticket. Jesusmaryandjoseph did we stick the fish today. Cord was right on ‘em. How you doing guy? You catch any?”

“My veterinarians,” Cook said.

“Veterinary surgeons,” the second guy corrected, and guffawed.

“Brad Verona and Brad Hawn. Great guys. From Minneapolis.”

“Saint Paul,” the second guy corrected, and guffawed louder.

“Still haven’t driven that vehicle of yours.” Cook seemed apologetic.

“That’s all right. Can I talk to you just a minute?”

“Don’t give away our secret spots!” one of them bellowed at our backs as we moved away toward the dumpsters beside Sorgensen’s shop.

“Don’t know if that was a fair deal,” Cook continued. “Especially seeing as I can reprint that photo. Hell, I can put it on the internet. Russell Crowe is mine for life. Plus I’m not even using the vehicle.”

“You’re a good guy, Cord. Sorry about your boat. Does that even things up?”

“I don’t know. What’s that vehicle worth?”

I shrugged. “Scrap.”

He laughed. “I hated that boat. It rode too low. The oars sucked.”

“I noticed that.”

“Season’s over for me anyway. School starts next week. Next summer I’m probably going to intern at a place in Denver.” He reached into his pocket. He tossed me the keys to the Cruise Master. “Here. Gas just went up to three-fifty a gallon. She’s all yours.”

We were quiet a moment, watching Cook’s veterinary surgeons root in a cooler for more beer. It was a sweet evening, cool enough that the forest fire smoke had a pleasant campfire essence, slightly crisp. The sun had plunged behind the Gallatins and we were in shadow beneath a pink-ribbed sky. For a change, the tall spruce windbreak out-fragranced Sorgensen’s dumpsters.

“I guess things worked out okay for your friend,” Cook said. “The black dude.”

“If he gets his health back.”

“I mean. Yeah. And it doesn’t surprise me about that lawyer. Jesse had a way of snagging guys like that. She didn’t mean to, she just …”

“Is Gray the one she dumped you for?”

Cook toed the gravel. “Yeah.” He looked off toward the ‘Stone. “Well. He was one of them. You never really knew with Jesse. But oh well. So what do we need to talk about?”

I told him I had come to follow up on Sorgensen’s story about Sneed and Jesse stealing a fly rod. Had he heard about that?

“Oh, sure,” Cook said. “Sorgensen announced it to the whole world. He made sure every guide in the business heard they were stealing from our vehicles. That’s a huge deal with us, you know, because we trust the shuttle drivers with our keys. Shit, half the time it’s the car key, the house key, everything, we hand it over to them on the faith they’re going to do nothing else but drive the vehicle, park it, and hide the keys where we ask them to.”

He finished his beer and tossed the can into the dumpster. He nodded toward his veterinary surgeons. The Brads were raising toasts to their fishing success.

“Hell, Dog, half these knuckleheads bring along their own keys too, their wallets, their credit cards, their hotel pass cards, the five-thousand-dollar bamboo rod that they just want to show off, it’s all sitting there available to the shuttle driver. If something gets stolen, we all know who did it.”

I thought about it. “So it’s a serious trust thing, like bonded workers, only—”

Cook laughed. “They’re mostly just college kids or drunks or both. But, knock-on-wood, it tends to work out.”

“So Sneed and Jesse ruined their reputations?”

“More like Sorgensen did.”

“Doesn’t it hurt his too?”

“Somewhat, I guess. Funny thing was, none of us had a rod stolen that we knew of. None of the clients either. And I mean, because it was Jesse—”

His eyes followed the St. Paul Brads. They were bumping chests. “Well, she was in enough trouble, so I asked around. I was going to blame the black dude and stick up for Jesse. That’s what everybody thought anyway. But it turned out that nobody had lost anything. Not that I could find out.”

“So why …?”

Cord Cook shrugged. “Maybe he made it up,” he said, looking over as the door to Sorgensen’s Fly ‘n’ Float banged open and out flung Sorgensen’s girl Lyndzee with her battered suitcases. “Like one time this Blackfoot driver Ronny Beaver got accused of siphoning gas. Sorgensen just didn’t want him around.”

Cook and I were out of sight and yet close enough to hear Lyndzee grumbling as she hauled the suitcases across the porch, where she ripped off old baggage tags and tossed them in the dumpster. Her voice sounded like a rake on gravel.

“Who the hell has that much family?”

“What?
” challenged Hilarious Sorgensen as he swayed onto the porch with his peanuts and his van keys.

I could see up through the slats of the deck rail—more than I wanted to. This girl Lyndzee had pale, bruisy legs and not a stitch of underpants. This close, she vibrated with what looked like rage or fear—or maybe it was a just a screaming amphetamine high.

“I said who the hell has that much family?”

“You do,” the big man replied, rattling his peanut jar. “You got family all over. They’re dropping like flies.”

“I swear, Larry. I’m not going.”

Sorgensen shrugged, tossed peanuts into his mouth. He side-saddled down the porch steps. He opened the rear doors of his van and waited. Lyndzee stood her ground on the deck for a full five seconds. Then she lifted her suitcases, tossed back her frazzled mess of coppery hair, and marched to the van.

“God damn,” Cook muttered beside me, “am I glad to be out of that.”

His eyes followed Lyndzee into the van. He shook his head. “That buzz. You get to be a slave to it, you know?”

Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe

 

Ninety percent is money for drugs. The rest is just for fun.

I had no grounds to debate Aretha’s premise. I just didn’t want to believe it. It didn’t seem right. I had a sense of drug crimes as being obvious, impulsive, brutal, and stupid—not like the subtle set-up of Jesse’s death—and I had a fatigue for the whole drug excuse as well. The world had become a television show, I was thinking, and everything was about drugs, even falsely stolen fly rods.

Hilarious Sorgensen held his cell phone to his ear, shifted painfully foot to foot beside his van for a full five minutes while inside Lyndzee reamed through radio stations before latching onto Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon.”

Finally Sorgensen snapped his phone shut. He nearly flattened his shocks getting into the van. As he was turning around, Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe pulled in off the highway. He circled Aretha’s jade-green Metro before parking in front of it, blocking my way out.

Sorgensen matched him window to window. They chatted for a half-minute before Sorgensen squirted gravel behind him and headed for the Bozeman airport with “Rhiannon” sailing out the window.

Cook was watching as I reached down into Sorgensen’s dumpster. Down among the beer cans and yellowjackets, I picked out the discarded baggage tags:
Toledo
. Not Memphis.
Toledo.

“Isn’t Toledo where your dentists the other day were from?” I asked Cook. “White Fang and Top Gum?”

“Yup.”

“But wasn’t Sorgensen talking about Memphis?”

“Dunno. Don’t listen to the man.”

Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe strolled up. He had a minor black eye and a bandage on his forehead. Fingers on his left hand were splinted and wrapped. “Evening, boys. How’d you do on the river today, Cord Cook?”

“Not bad. Even the veterinarians caught fish.”

“I never asked you, Russell,” I said. “Do you fish?”

The acting interim sheriff frowned, swung the jaw bone my way. “Yes, you did ask me. And yes, I do fish.”

“Really?” Cook was surprised. “I never heard that before, Russell.”

Russell levered open a smile. “Well, boys, you’re hearing it here. Grew up fishing the Missouri River.”

Again Cook was startled. “Really? What section?”

“Pretty much all of it.”

Cook nodded. His cool grey eyes—the ones that must have attracted Jesse—stayed on Crowe’s face. “I’ll bet your favorite stretch is west of Holter Dam toward Wolf Creek.”

“Absolutely,” Crowe said. “Beautiful water. Caught an eight-pound brown in there.” He turned to me. “Now, Mister Oglivie, I am sorry but this is your fourth offense driving without a license. That’s automatic jail time without bail.”

He tossed his shock of black hair, still smiling. He touched the side of his black eye and winced.

“Just to show you what a good guy I am, though, I’m gonna let you drive away. But lax enforcement is not going to fly anymore with the county board. They’ve had enough. I see you behind the wheel in Park County again, I’m afraid I’ll have to—”

Cord Cook stopped him. “This isn’t necessary, Russell.”

Acting Interim Sheriff Crowe switched jaw angles. “Huh?”

“There is no stretch of the Missouri River west of Holter Dam toward Wolf Creek,” Cook said. “The river runs north-south through there, and it’s sheer rock up to Flesher Pass.” Cook paused. “You always tried too hard to be a man, Russell. But just to show you what a nice guy I am, I won’t tell anyone how full of shit you still are.”

Crowe put his splinted hand to his belt, fixed his eyes on the mid-distant Yellowstone River, striking a pose that attempted an Andy Griffith-style affectionate weariness with the shenanigans of his people. But it played as a smirk—and I slapped it off him with a stiff clap to the shoulder.

“Now
I remember what it was I never asked you,” I said. “Guy like you, Russell, I’ll bet you had a go or two at Jesse, huh? Am I right? And she dumped you?”

Crowe’s eyes closed to slits. His chin moved side to side on the twin booms of his fabulous jaw bone. We waited. He offered no answer, so Cord Cook told me, “Actually, I heard his mother said he couldn’t get anywhere near to Jesse. So I wonder how that party picture would sit with her.”

Now Cook clapped the acting interim sheriff on his other shoulder.

“But anyway, Russell, what vehicle?”

“Uh—” Russell stuck his chin at the little green Metro. “Oh, that’s me,” Cook said. “I drove that one. And whatever else after this point you think my friend Dog here might be driving.”